User Interface: Android 2.3.5 Gingerbread and TouchWiz 4.0

The Samsung Exhibit II 4G makes up for its lack of looks in its software department. With the latest Gingerbread version and the most recent TouchWiz launcher on board, you will be looking at a Galaxy S II experience for about a third of the budget.

We have prepared a video of the device in action. Check it out below.

The changes in TouchWiz 4.0, compared to its previous versions, begin at the very lock screen, which you can now remove by swiping in any direction, rather than just sideways. The cool feature where missed events (messages, calls etc) get their own unlock patterns is still here too.

The lockscreen can be removed by swiping in any direction

The homescreen got plenty of tweaks too. You get rectangular design for the widgets and a lot of functionality. The process of adding widgets is visually enhanced too with attractive transition effects.

The Exhibit II homescreen

Editing the homescreen panes is business as usual – you pinch zoom-out to display an aggregate view of all panes, which you can then easily rearrange, delete or add.

Editing the homescreen

The numbered dots that identify the homescreen panels serve as a scroll bar too. A press and hold on the dots lets you scroll sideways through the resized images of the available homescreen panes in one short go rather than with several swipes.

Scrolling between homescreens looks great

The app launcher is improved as well. You can now create folders inside it (though given that folders are enabled on the homescreen we don’t see much use for that here). Different view types are available for you to choose.

The app launcher

You can rearrange the app panels within the launcher in a similar fashion as the homescreen ones. A pinch gesture lays them out in front you.

Rearranging the app panels within the launcher

Creating folders is pretty easy stuff – in edit mode you drag the icons you want over to a blank folder icon at the bottom of the screen. Then you drag the folder to the screen on which you want it to be placed and pick a name for it.

Creating a new folder

The notification area has been slightly redesigned in TouchWiz 4, but there aren’t any major changes to functionality there.

The notification area

The task manager, which Samsung has preinstalled, offers a lot of functionality. With the Gingerbread policy of keeping resource-hungry background processes in check, we are not sure you will need to enter the task manager all that often, but it doesn’t hurt having it. It also comes with a handy widget which shows you the number of active applications straight on your homescreen.

The task manager and its widget

Synthetic benchmarks

With a single core Snapdragon CPU, clocked at 1GHz, the Samsung Exhibit II 4G is certainly not a benchmark ninja. In any case, we have compiled several for you to give you an idea of its performance.

Quadrant • AnTuTu • Pi • Neocore

As you can see above, the performance of the device is in line with the similarly equipped alternatives out there.

In our experience with the Exhibit II, we found a considerable amount of lag in its UI. Since this is our first experience of TouchWiz 4.0 on a single-core Samsung, we believe that the latest launcher offers a much better experience with an extra core at play.